Let her works praise her in the gates. The gates are the whole argument this morning.

The gate of a walled town was not scenery. It was the courthouse, the market floor, the record office and the town council at once. Deals were witnessed there, disputes settled there, and a person’s standing handed out or withheld there. If you wanted a thing true publicly rather than only inside your own house, that is where you took it.

The verse takes that gate for granted and sends something into it: let her works praise her.

Now count how often this poem puts our woman in that place. Once, and it is not about her. Her husband is honourable in the gates, when he sitteth among the senators of the land. He gets the seat, the honour and the company of the elders, and the poem says nothing else about him at all.

She gets wool, flax, a ship, a field, a vineyard, a lamp burning at night, a hand opened to the needy. Twenty verses of work, and no seat anywhere.

What the poem offers her instead of a seat is this: let her works praise her.

Then the last verse walks into that same gateway and asks for something else. Let her works praise her in the gates. Not give her a seat. Not make her a senator. Send the works to the place where standing is decided, and let them speak there on their own.

Look at what the poem does two lines before. Favour is deceitful, and beauty is vain. It takes the two measures a woman of that town was most reliably judged by and calls them both broken instruments, and only then says: let her works praise her.

So the sentence is a substitution. Out go charm and appearance, out goes the husband’s honourable seat, and in go twenty-eight beds and a coat given away in the snow.

Let her works praise her. Nothing else in the poem is left standing to do it.

Now the teaching this dismantles, because I did not come here to admire a piece of Hebrew poetry.

There is a teaching almost never said aloud and enforced constantly. Your works do not count until somebody with standing says they count. You need a name behind you, a family in the pew, a household that will speak for you. Without that, what you did is not evidence—it is a story you tell about yourself.

That teaching has specific casualties and I will name them. People whose families will not speak for them. People who were shown the door, or quietly stopped being invited, or who left because staying was not survivable. People whose parents will not say their name, and people who have no one at all to bring.

To every one of them, the last line of this poem says the same six words. Let her works praise her.

The grammar is what does the refusing. The verse routes her through nobody. It does not say let her husband praise her or let her children speak for her, though both appear two verses earlier and could easily have closed the poem. They praise her at home, and then the poem sends her works out to the gate by themselves.

That is a second route, opened on purpose, for anyone whose household will not walk them to the gate. Let her works praise her means the works are admissible without an escort.

Yesterday we sat with a sentence about a place made by God and not by us, and today’s claim is close to it and not the same. That day asked whether you had to come from somewhere in order to belong in a room. Today asks whether you need somebody to vouch for you before what you did may be mentioned. Belonging and endorsement are two locks on one door, and this verse picks the second.

Endorsement is the lock, and let her works praise her is the key cut for it.

Nor is this a good work begun in one person and finished by somebody else, where we stood six days ago. That was about who finishes the work; let her works praise her is about who may speak for it.

Every teaching gets judged by what it grows, and this one has a harvest inside Christianity’s own house. Family services arranged around two parents in a pew. Baptisms built on the presence of relatives. Ledgers that for centuries entered a woman’s charity under her husband’s name, because his was the name with standing. Rooms where the first question asked is who brought you.

Let her works praise her cuts against every one of those arrangements.

What it grows is people who have concluded, quietly and permanently, that their good is inadmissible. They know exactly what they did. They have simply worked out that there is no one to say it in the gate, and so they stop expecting it said.

Against all of that, one line: let her works praise her.

Let her works praise her, and let nobody be asked to introduce them.

Now the woman the Church puts in front of us, because her life is this verse under load.

Elizabeth was born in 1207, probably at Pressburg, daughter of King Andrew II of Hungary, and married in 1221 at fourteen. In the famine of 1226, the record of her life says she built below the Wartburg a hospital with twenty-eight beds and visited the inmates daily to attend to their wants, and that she aided nine hundred poor daily. Her husband died of the pest at Otranto on 11 September 1227. She was a widow at twenty.

Twenty-eight beds and nine hundred people fed in a famine year. Let her works praise her.

Then it goes wrong, and the sources disagree about how. Up to 1888 it was believed, on a servant’s testimony at the canonization process, that her brother-in-law drove her from the Wartburg in the winter of 1227. Later investigators argued she left of her own accord, under pressure rather than force, and a study of 1907 placed the expulsion at Marburg. She went out of a castle in winter with two attendants, and past that the record is contested, and I am not going to smooth it.

What is not contested is who she was handed to. Her director at Marburg was Master Conrad, called by that same record a very ascetic and, in its own words, a somewhat rough and very severe man. It says he treated Elizabeth with inexorable severity, even using corporal means of correction. It says he took from her her devoted domestics.

Let her works praise her, because the man set over her is plainly not going to.

I am leaving that standing without softening it, because softening is how the fruit of a thing gets kept out of sight. A young widow already put out of one house was placed under a man who corrected her body, inside the Church, and the Church’s own encyclopedia is what tells us so.

Which is why the verse lands so hard on her feast. Every person who might have spoken for Elizabeth in the gate either died, expelled her, or disciplined her.

So what is left of her? In the summer of 1228 she built the Franciscan hospital at Marburg and devoted herself entirely to the care of the sick, especially those afflicted with the most loathsome diseases. She was dead at twenty-four, on 17 November 1231.

Let her works praise her. There is nobody in that account who can, and nobody who needs to.

At Pentecost of 1235 Gregory IX canonized her at Perugia, by which time everyone who might have vouched for her was gone or discredited. The works went to the gate alone, and the gate heard them.

Four years, no relatives, and let her works praise her turned out to be enough.

Now the pope commemorated beside her, because the Missal has set an exact pair on one day. Let her works praise her turns out to hold for a man in a mine as well.

Pontian was made pope on 21 July 230 and reigned until 235, when he was banished to the unhealthy island of Sardinia under Maximinus, and Hippolytus was banished with him. Then the account of his pontificate records what almost no early pope did. He resigned, on 28 September 235, the old Roman list marking it with the single word discinctus—ungirt, the belt of office taken off. He gave up the highest seat there was, because he could not do the work of it from a mine.

Hold that against a line from the Epistle. She hath girded her loins with strength. She girds; he is ungirt. I make no claim that the Church built the day as a pun, having no evidence for it—only that both words sit in one Mass, and that a man who takes the belt off an office is not emptied of what he did while wearing it.

Let her works praise her covers him too, and the Missal seems to think so.

How long he lasted in Sardinia is unknown, and the record says so plainly. Fabian brought his remains back to Rome, and he was buried on 13 August in the papal crypt of the Catacomb of Callistus. A date, a grave and one honest act of standing down.

The Collect asked exactly this of us: make us look upon the prosperity of this world as nought. A princess who ended on a hospital ward and a pope who ended in a mine are what that prayer looks like once it is answered.

Let her works praise her, then, and let the seat go.

There is a story sometimes told of a woman in her fifties who came to a small city from another country nine years ago, and whose nursing qualification does not carry over. She cleans a dental surgery from six in the morning. On Saturdays she sits in a back room at a community centre with people who have just arrived, filling in their forms—housing applications, appeals, letters to a clinic.

When the council proposed closing that room, twelve people came to the consultation at the town hall. Each said one sentence about a form she had filled in for them. She was not there. She was three miles away wiping down a waiting room, and did not learn it had happened until the following Saturday.

That is let her works praise her, exactly as written. She had no family in that city and no professional standing in that country to lend her. She had twelve forms, and the forms went to the gate on their own and spoke, and she was somewhere else.

Nothing was fixed by it, and I am not going to tell you otherwise. The room closed anyway, at the end of the following March. What the twelve said went into the minutes, though, and the minutes are the gate.

Let her works praise her, and the record holds it whether the room stayed open or not.

Christ’s parables this morning are all divestment, which is why they sit under this Epistle. The man in the field sells all that he hath. The merchant sells all that he had for one pearl. What each lets go is the thing that would have given him standing in a market, and neither appears to mind.

Divestment the whole way down, and still: let her works praise her.

Then the net comes up with all kind of fishes in it, everything at once, and the sorting happens afterward—on the shore, at the end of the world, by angels. See where it does not happen. Not at the gate, and not by whoever sits there.

The gate can refuse to hear you and still not be the last word about you, because Christ has put the sorting somewhere else and into somebody else’s hands. Sunday’s promise about thoughts of peace was made to people in exactly that position, and it was not conditional on anybody confirming them.

Let her works praise her, and let the sorting wait for the shore.

The last picture is the storeroom—new things and old, brought out together, nothing discarded for being either. Twelve forms and a hospital ward come from the same cupboard, and so does being faithful over a few things and that multitude which no man could number we began November with. The number was never the qualification.

For anyone here holding none of the theology, the claim translates with nothing lost. What a person actually did is evidence on its own, and requiring a sponsor before it may be entered is a rule about power rather than a rule about truth. If nobody will speak for you, that is a fact about your circumstances and not a verdict on your work.

Let her works praise her holds up in either language.

So here is the day, and it is smaller than the readings’ grandeur suggests. Something you did is sitting in the record with nobody’s name attached to it, and it is still in the record.

Let her works praise her. The verse says it without asking who your people are.

And that is the whole of the instruction: let her works praise her.

Go and do the work. Let her works praise her, and let yours walk to the gate the same way.

↑ The order resumes below.